Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at KQED: 2021Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at KQED: 2021

Independent public media is a treasured resource. However, to truly serve the public we have a responsibility to reflect and fully represent our diverse communities and their experiences.

At KQED, we see that we can be better — we know that we must be — at advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. More of the same is not enough. We need to build the best version of ourselves.

This Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Staff Impact Plan and Report represents our continuous and necessary work to inspire DEI-related change in KQED's culture and practices. Our goal in creating it was to provide an accurate and intersectional snapshot of who we are now and to reveal opportunities for growth and change. It's the product of significant staff time and emotional labor with the full support of the Senior Leadership Team.

 

 

KQED Seeks Meaningful Change

Racism and the systems that devalue the humanity of anyone are unacceptable. The racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020 accelerated our efforts, begun in 2018, to do more.

To that end, we sought actionable feedback from our staff. In October 2020, we launched a comprehensive Inclusion and Engagement Staff Survey followed by a deep dive into the responses with broad focus groups, including affinity focus groups and other efforts. Analysis of staff feedback revealed shared challenges in three key areas at KQED: (1) workplace culture, (2) equity and transparency in systems and practices, and (3) equitable career and leadership development. The following summaries indicate where KQED seeks meaningful change.

Workplace Culture

Workplace culture is the collection of shared values, motivations and practices that inform how we work together. A healthy work culture ensures that staff can contribute to the overall goals of KQED while also bringing the vibrancy of their talents and creativity to their work.

The 2020 Inclusion and Engagement Survey included a demographic survey, KQED's most comprehensive to date. The results provided the necessary data needed to take an intersectional approach to this work. Anti-racism is a critical lens through which to understand our challenges, but through this lens it's incumbent on us to include the many facets of staff identity. We looked at race, ethnicity and gender, but also disability, age, socioeconomic background and even student loan debt. The data shows a clearer snapshot of who we are and what we can do to increase the experience of belonging at work.

Authenticity

We're at our best when everyone can apply their full and authentic selves to their work. The results from our 2020 Inclusion and Engagement Survey identified a gap in this important aspect of our culture: A majority of Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, White, Hispanic/Latinx^[1]  and East Asian^[2] staff agreed with the statement, "I feel like I can be my authentic self at work." However, only 33% of South Asian, 48% of Black and 36% of staff identifying as two or more races agreed with that statement.

While we're proud of our past work to cultivate a diverse and inclusive workplace, we have more work to do.

Equity and Transparency in Systems and Practices

Our survey results indicate we need more operational transparency in decision-making, feedback and collaboration. In follow-up focus groups, we heard that some staff experience KQED as a “top-down,” “need-to-know” organization where it's difficult to find information about resources, processes and decisions. This impacts performance, trust and overall engagement for everyone. In the absence of communication, staff sometimes assume the worst.

We believe that transparency across systems and practices will foster a feeling of belonging for staff. Improving transparency will create a shared understanding of priorities and policy change, equitable access to development and advancement, trust in performance evaluations and feedback resiliency.

Talent and Leadership Development

As with any organization, a true test of our governance and leadership is the ability to reap the benefits of diversity and to develop and retain a diverse staff.

KQED is an organization where women say they bring their authentic selves to work and see themselves in leadership roles. While women hold 55% of our current leadership roles^[3], 61% are white, 9% are Latinx, and 7% are Black or African American. KQED's diversity goals over the past several years have been focused on increasing Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) representation in leadership at KQED and improving Latinx and Black representation throughout our organization to more closely match our Bay Area population.

The data presented below shows that KQED increased our overall representation of BIPOC staff in the organization by 3% in 2021.

In the past year, as discussed below, KQED strengthened and focused its sourcing and talent acquisition practices and methods to better meet our diversity goals: 67% of all staff hired, which includes on-call and temporary staff, were BIPOC with 63% identifying as female and 2% as nonbinary. 83% of all interns hired identify as BIPOC and 80% are female with 3% identifying as nonbinary. 62% of regular and limited-term employees hired identify as BIPOC with 53% as female and 2% as nonbinary. 12 job offers were declined last year; 83% of those offers went to BIPOC candidates.

Without enough representation in leadership, staff from any historically marginalized group don't truly feel equal, included and understood. Despite long-term efforts to recruit, retain and promote staff of color, BIPOC staff remain under-represented in our leadership roles at 36%.*

(*A prior version of this report stated this number as 39%. 36% is the correct percentage.)

In the past year, there were 9 openings in leadership roles. 54% of employment or promotion offers went to BIPOC candidates. However, our overall BIPOC representation in leadership roles increased by only 1%, illustrating how much more we need to do.

We're also seeing our colleagues of color depart our organization at a higher rate than white staff. Therefore, the results from our Inclusion and Engagement Survey and our exit interview data will be critical in identifying the changes needed to retain and promote our current BIPOC employees.

Based on the survey and focus group results, as discussed more fully below, we set a goal in 2021 to create a promotion process that eliminates any perceived requirement for self-advocacy in promotions and reduces the potential for bias. On a positive note, survey results show that employees across all demographics agreed they have access to the learning and development needed to do their jobs well.

KQED will explore other ways to support internal staff advancement and bring more diversity to the organization.
<h2">Taking Action

The Senior Leadership Team has committed to action steps in our three areas of focus based on recommendations from the Diversity Council plus forward-looking measures to ensure accountability. This action plan is the template for our progress report, which we will update regularly.

Workplace Culture

At KQED, the way we work together informs the work that we do. If our workplace culture is inequitable, homogenous and exclusionary, we can't adequately serve the diverse needs of our communities.

The results from our survey and focus groups pushed us to assess our approach to our ongoing DEI initiatives and to create a robust set of findings and recommendations to build a more equitable and inclusive organization.

We had detailed, necessary and hard conversations about race, equity, inclusion, representation and power — and how KQED reports on these issues in our content. We listened to and learned that some staff feel undervalued in ways that are characteristic with systemic inequality.

Across all factors, Black, Latinx and South Asian staff rated their experience at KQED on average 10% lower than white, Southeast Asian, and East Asian staff. KQED conducted follow-up affinity focus groups with Black, Latinx, and South Asian staff to discuss and determine gaps and needs.

The focus groups discussed the challenges of showing up to work authentically and not seeing individuals with shared identities in leadership positions.

Black, Latinx and South Asian women in particular stated in the focus groups that they believed that their contributions were not valued equitably, and expressed lower confidence overall in their professional opportunities at KQED. These groups expressed feelings of being misunderstood, diminished and isolated in their work.

Based on staff input and recommendations, the following groups/initiatives have been put in place to create a more inclusive and diverse workplace culture and are a foundation on which to build:

Diversity Council

We created this cross-functional group in 2018 to coordinate KQED's Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Last year, we carved out an interim role focused on leading the survey, focus groups and the development of KQED's action plan and report. In 2022, we intend to provide more clarity and permanence on the role and responsibilities of the Diversity Council. For example, part of our work towards achieving our inclusion goals includes doing more than engaging staff on how to be more inclusive, but equipping staff with the skills necessary to advance resilience and cultivate a compassionate culture. The Diversity Council will drive this work.

Employee Resource and Affinity Groups

In 2018, we established the first KQED Employee Resource Groups, which are voluntary, employee-led teams with the stated purpose of fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and acting as a resource for group members and other KQED staff. Following a staff survey, employees volunteered to form the following: KQED Ethnic and Racial Diversity Group, LGBT@Q, Parents and Caregivers Together, and Women's Network. Each ERG has an executive sponsor from the Senior Leadership Team.

In response to the events of 2020, the needs of our staff have changed and are more magnified. In March 2020, COVID-19 was rapidly spreading in the United States. Within one week, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and all nine Bay Area counties were placed under a mandatory shelter-in-place order. KQED then pivoted to a remote work environment for most of our staff and made use of Slack channels to facilitate communication and collaboration. Our virtual channels created virtual communities and built new connections, which are instrumental to our evolution as an organization. The Ethnic and Racial Diversity Group evolved into focused affinity spaces on Slack to allow staff to build community in a psychologically safe environment. Staff created numerous grassroots, employee-led channels to increase awareness of anti-racism and accessibility.

With these changes and lessons learned, we're in the process of restructuring the role of Employee Resource Groups to further support a culture of anti-racism and inclusion at KQED. We have reimagined the ERGs as a bridge between staff and leadership in specific areas of need to both outwardly and inwardly educate and support group members and allies. Our ERGs and the Diversity Council will play a key role in ensuring staff engagement and inclusivity as KQED implements a new hybrid work model that maintains remote flexibility with some presence in the office once we're re-established in our new Mariposa headquarters.

Competency-building

KQED will continue to customize workshops and training sessions to establish DEI norms and behavior expectations through professional development and structural and cultural competency workshops.

Cultural competency is the ability to function effectively within a new cultural context and interact effectively with people from different backgrounds.

Structural competency is the capacity for all employees to recognize and respond to bias as the direct outcome of systemic social, political and economic inequities.

These competencies must be woven into project management skills to allow for any training to be put into practice. We will design a new learning model to address inclusive practices in our day-to-day work. This will build a comprehensive understanding of how we can work with an intersectional anti-racism lens.

Understanding Who We Are

To better understand our DEI opportunities and gaps, we have focused on gathering more meaningful demographic data to give us a deeper understanding of our staff composition.

In early 2021, we broadened our demographic data beyond the federal reporting categories and offered staff ways to identify that more closely match how they view themselves and experience the world. Additionally, we sliced the data by department, type of employment, level and observed the race/ethnicity categories, including focusing on employee data of those who directly create content. We looked at hiring, retention, attrition and promotion data broken down by individual race/ethnicity and gender. We then published this information for our staff to review. We will continue to update staff internally to progress-check and build accountability processes.

The chart below shows the makeup of our KQED regular and limited-term staff at the end of July 2020, using the federal reporting categories for race/ethnicity. The snapshot below also reflects a staff that was 62% female.

Our regular and limited-term staff as of the end of August 2021 is shown below using our broader demographic categories. Our staff remains 62% female and 1% identify as nonbinary.

We hired 47 regular and limited-term staff in the past year. 62% of those positions went to BIPOC individuals and 51% to staff identifying as female and 2% to staff identifying as nonbinary.

We also reviewed staff terminations to see where we can improve. In 2021, we saw that BIPOC staff departed KQED (both voluntarily and involuntarily) at a higher rate than white staff. Female staff also left KQED at a higher rate than expected based on the overall population. We have always conducted exit interviews, but last year we shifted to Culture Amp — an online engagement, performance and employee development platform — to survey our outgoing staff to gather more and better data about reasons why staff depart KQED. We have received a higher response rate with more actionable data and will use this feedback to improve retention and inclusivity at KQED.

Finally, to provide some context on our staff composition, we compared ourselves to the overall Bay Area market and our audiences.

*Note about the “Other” category above: For audience and Bay Area census data, Other includes Native American, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. For KQED staff, this category also includes “Two or More Races.”

Content

Improving diversity and our internal culture will strengthen the content we create, the stories we report and the truths we reveal.
KQED is one of the nation's most listened to and watched public media outlets. Our content reaches 2.6 million adults in the Bay Area each week. However, as the reckoning of race in the media grew in 2020, we knew we had more work to do to attract an audience that accurately reflects the Bay Area's diverse communities.

By acknowledging that one reporter (or organization) is unable to hold an objectively neutral position, our content reveals the collective and layered truths of our human experiences and the many ways we are influenced by power. We have a duty to provide transparency and equip our communities with the information and creative agency to hold powerful people and institutions accountable.

In the aftermath of an anti-racist rebellion in New York (1964), Watts (1965), Cleveland (1966), and the “long, hot summer of 1967” resulting in over 85 deaths and 11,000 arrests across 160 American cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the 1968 Kerner Commission to investigate the source of the unrest. The Kerner Commission report concluded, “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” The report also laid responsibility with news organizations who continued to misrepresent Black Americans and recommended newsrooms diversify their staff immediately. Newsroom demographics fell short of reflecting the racial demographics of the communities in which they're located. This lack of newsroom diversity revealed who is truly served: white audiences.
Fast forward 50 years and we know we're not there yet. We see this in KQED's own staffing: 54% of our newsroom and the broader content team are white, 61% of our news staff have a white manager, while 58% of our audience is white, and 53% of the Bay Area market is white.

This correlation communicates that we need to do better at accurately reflecting the stories and experiences of all Bay Area residents. As news organizations report on systemic inequities, we must engage in self-reflection to address these inequities. Part of that self-reflection began in the summer of 2020 when a group of BIPOC employees approached KQED leadership about how we can address systemic racism within the organization and provided recommendations for change, many of which were implemented and are included in this report.

Equity and Transparency in Systems and Practices

According to staff, one of our key challenges is a lack of operational transparency. We need to make our decision-making processes more transparent to boost trust and improve collaboration. For this, we turn to the guiding principles of our mission.

Inform
Share what's happening across KQED — both highlights and challenges — and provide information on how to get things done.

Inspire
Give credit and performance feedback for a job well done. Connect our work to our mission.

Involve
Gather employee input on a regular and ongoing basis and use that feedback to help think through decisions, provide rationale (not just conclusions), give options, and increase understanding of those options to allow for informed decision making.

Fair Pay

Transparency in our compensation practices is key to creating equity and employee trust. KQED regularly reviews employee pay in three ways: (1) market analysis to ensure KQED pays employees at market rate against comparable companies; (2) a classification analysis to ensure KQED consistently and appropriately classifies employees in the right job family and job level; and, (3) an equity analysis to ensure KQED is paying employees performing similar work equivalently.

Our Human Resources (HR) team works with an external compensation firm to update KQED's market analysis every 3 to 4 years. This firm provides competitive pay rates by reviewing and averaging the salaries of similar companies and provides KQED with definitions for its job families and job levels. HR conducts internal classification analysis 1-2 times per year.

For the past several years, HR has performed the pay equity review 1-2 times per year. In April 2021, KQED hired an external pay-equity auditing firm to conduct our pay-equity analysis. This firm reviewed employee pay and used a variety of statistical tools to look for differences in pay by race, gender, job family and job level. Where groupings were too small to measure, nonstatistical sampling methods were used to look for disparities. No disparities or equity concerns were found in either of these analytical methods. The firm did identify a handful of staff who were low in their salary range; many were consistent with those flagged by HR in its classification review. In other words, there were no disparities in pay by race or gender while allowing for prior experience and/or time with KQED.

KQED is committed to fair market-rate pay and will continue with its regular compensation reviews including partnering with external auditors and experts. Beginning in September 2021, KQED will include its compensation philosophy and detailed explanations on how job levels and market-rate pay is determined in its employee handbook.

Promotions

KQED promoted 24 employees in the past year. 75% of the promotions went to women and 46% to BIPOC staff.

We learned from our Inclusion and Engagement Survey that staff doesn't have a clear understanding of the process and criteria for promotions. Our staff identified a lack of transparency and inconsistency in deciding and communicating about promotions, which creates concerns about potential inequity in the process.

As part of survey action items, we convened a working group of cross-functional staff to collaborate with HR on increasing fairness and transparency in the promotion process.

The working group recommended a handful of changes in our promotions process, including:

• Revise our employee handbook to include definitions of the different types of promotions available and qualifying criteria so that employees and managers are aligned and aware of opportunities;
• Human Resources will integrate promotion readiness conversations into department Talent Reviews and support managers to identify potential candidates for promotion. These changes will ensure self-advocacy is not a hidden requirement for promotion;
• The working group created templates and guidelines for communicating promotions to all staff so that announcements are equitable and to reduce the perception that KQED values higher-level staff promotions.

Performance Evaluations and Merit Increases

KQED launched merit-based pay system and a new performance evaluation structure in 2017 based on the recommendations of a volunteer, cross-functional employee working group. KQED uses a calibration process to help ensure performance appraisals are fair and accurate across managers, departments and job levels. KQED includes self- and peer-reviews to inform their performance review.

To continuously improve, we will work with our performance platform, Culture Amp, to help us measure and analyze our performance-evaluation process.

Feedback

Like employees at many organizations, KQED staff can struggle with constructive feedback. To support resiliency for giving and receiving constructive feedback, we identified critical supportive ways to normalize providing and accepting constructive feedback.

We know that employees are recruited by a company but often leave their manager when they resign. This year, we piloted a 360-degree feedback program for people managers at all levels. This new program will help us identify and address leadership and management competencies for our people managers. Our program includes a self-reflection from the employee and survey feedback from nominated colleagues, direct/indirect reports and managers. The results of this feedback will allow leaders and managers to take action on their own development opportunities. This will come along with coaching and support from Human Resources. In the coming year we intend to implement the 360-degree feedback program to all people managers as a development tool.

Inclusive Approaches to Content Creation

To bridge our internal culture with our reporting, a group of journalists, producers and editors from across all content teams created the News Lens working groups. Our content teams include: Arts & Culture, Education, News, Podcasts, Science and Environment, and our FM and TV programming.
These groups formed to establish an anti-oppression, anti-racist, inclusionary framework in ways that are unique to our programming and commensurate with how our journalists gather and present information. Their goal: To plan and execute a DEI strategy for all content teams that creates awareness of unconscious bias and identifies and offers tools to translate anti-racism into the workflows of journalism.

The News Lens working groups focus on the following key areas:

• Talent pipeline
• Framing and language
• Systems and power
• On-air programming
• Allyship

Beginning in fall 2019, the Education team partnered with Promise54, a DEI education consulting firm, to support the departmental priorities. This work culminated in an action plan in the following ways.

• Support Black, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander educators to gain media literacy competencies and achieve certification.
• Update course content on KQED Teach to better support teachers serving the needs of English learners related to media literacy. Audit and update, as needed, resources on KQED Learn designed to support the participation of English learners in discussions and challenges.
• Do the work we need to do as a department to ensure the content we produce is culturally responsive.

"Institutional racism has a role in most if not all of our systems and as a result in our lives. Therefore, it has a role in all our stories. Our work is now to reimagine how we conceive and frame our stories and journalism to reflect the inequity that runs through everything. That's going to be my number one priority."

— Vinnee Tong, Managing Editor, KQED News

We have a responsibility to cultivate an inclusive newsroom with reporting that centers on the diverse Bay Area communities.

At KQED, we create original journalism that is contextual and reflects our audiences with a focus on the people who live in the Bay Area and California. Our top values are accuracy, empathy, equity, accountability and illumination.

We work with our audiences to make sure our journalism is useful in their lives. We employ journalistic and investigative reporting skills to do this. We will ask people about their information needs, especially people who aren't currently part of KQED's audiences.
This is our north star.

Looking ahead, our senior content leaders are designing a new vision to reimagine our programming and reporting for KQED.

The KQED audience is disproportionately white and affluent.^[4] We are invested in making sure that we serve an audience that is more representative of the region. Additionally, as a result of internal source audit research, we also know that Black, Asian/Asian American, and Hispanic/Latinx are underrepresented.

While the Bay Area is one of the most diverse regions in the nation, significant disparities exist in our newsroom and gathering the right data will help us address these issues. As a result, we developed a retroactive source audit of our content to know where we stand when it comes to reflecting our communities. A source audit involves identifying certain characteristics such as gender, race, age and location of people who appear in our stories as sources and comparing that information to local demographic data. We completed the baseline audit in December 2020 and found that, overall, KQED coverage has equitable gender representation and highlights Black voices, but Hispanic/Latinx and Asian American voices are under-represented compared to the region. Going forward, KQED reporters will collect demographic data from sources so we can track progress against goals.

Talent and Leadership Development

From our review of demographic data over the past few years, we learned we have not made enough progress in hiring and retaining BIPOC staff, especially at the leadership level. To accomplish our goal to increase our representation of Black and Latinx staff in leadership, we are performing an ongoing holistic assessment of our talent pipeline.

• Assessment of our recruitment and hiring processes. Our findings show that we are recruiting a diverse pool of candidates, but we're losing some along the way. To measure this, we introduced methods to record the demographics of applicants so we can learn where we lose them in the recruitment process.
• Candidate sourcing. We tested and built a consistent and effective source list and process to increase applicant flow from candidate pools that will attract Black and Latinx applicants.
• Implicit bias training. We'll revise our current implicit bias training, in place since 2018, to be an integrated prerequisite for all stakeholders involved in the recruiting/hiring process. We'll provide anti-bias support for hiring managers during recruitment strategy sessions to ensure that they are identifying their goals and objectives for the hire and to ensure that we are identifying effective sourcing strategies.

Development of Newsroom Staff

This year, we created the new role of Editor of Talent Development to ensure that interns and on-call staff are equitably hired, onboarded, assigned, developed and considered for advancement. This editor will design career pipeline opportunities for all News staff (notably interns and on-call staff) and will partner with HR to highlight additional opportunities to increase transparency in growth opportunities.

81% of internships the past year in the Newsroom were offered to employees who identify as female (77%) and nonbinary (4%). Below is a breakdown of last years' News internships by race and ethnicity.

Development of Emerging Leaders

Leadership and decision-making processes must be informed by the people and the communities we serve, especially those groups who have been historically under-represented and marginalized. The leadership at KQED is not as diverse as it needs to be. We are committed to increasing our Black and Latinx leadership to match Bay Area demographics. The Senior Leadership Team is reviewing our leadership structure and working with the Diversity Council to design new opportunities to expand representation among our decision-makers and within our decision-making processes.

We have designed a leadership program for emerging, developing, and experienced leaders with the goal of supporting present and future BIPOC leaders. Opportunities to lead can occur before an employee becomes a people manager. This six-month leadership development program is offered annually based on the annual Talent Review. The goal is to focus on developing an internal talent pipeline to not only ensure all staff have equitable access to development, but also to increase our diversity in alignment with our goals.

Inclusive Leadership

According to a 2019 Catalyst report, a manager's behavior has a direct link to an employee's experience of inclusion. Almost half of an employee's experience of inclusion can be explained by managerial inclusive leadership behaviors. This year, we will hold inclusive leadership training across KQED to support people managers to build cultural competency and resiliency. The goal of this training will be to support managers in ensuring their teams — particularly staff from historically marginalized groups — feel valued and included.

With Gratitude

Thank you to all our KQED colleagues who are helping to advance our DEI work and who contributed to this impact report and plan. Our Diversity Council led our 2020 Inclusion and Engagement Survey and our response to the results. They involved dozens of their colleagues in volunteer staff focus groups. Our Human Resources department reviewed current practices, launched new initiatives and championed increasing diversity, equity and inclusion with managers and teams. We also received input from staff members who formed working groups in our content divisions to look at opportunities in hiring, talent development and content creation. And we collected constructive input from the KQED Community Advisory Panel.

This work can be messy and challenging, but we believe perfect is the enemy of good. We look forward to the road ahead equipped with the necessary tools to confront our challenges boldly with curiosity and a reinforced hope and commitment to creating an inclusive and equitable KQED culture.

Endnotes

(1) We use Latinx as an inclusive term to identify people of all genders of Latin American descent. Inclusive language creates meaning and affirms the full spectrum of genders, including those who do not identify explicitly as men or women. We use this term to communicate acceptance toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) and transgender/gender nonconforming (TGNC) communities.

(2) We established demographic categories beyond the Federal EEO requirement. The categories are: African American/Black; East Asian (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Taiwanese); Hispanic/Latinx; Chicanx/o/a; Native American/Alaskan Native; Pacific Islander; South Asian (including Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan). Also, Southeast Asian (including Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, Mien, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese); Middle Eastern (inclusive of North Africa, aka MENA); white; and two or more races.

(3) Leadership in this context are those staff members in KQED job levels 4-8, which includes managers, directors, senior editors and producers, executive directors, vice presidents and C-Level employees.

(4) 53.3% of our audience earns over $100k, compared to 49.6% of the Bay Area. External market research data, (Jan 2020 - Jan 2021).